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Colorado is ranking well in best places to build a biz!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:18:00 +0000

I came across this article in the Denver Business Journal which re-casted a Forbes article on the best places to build and maintain a business for 2009.

Five Colorado cities rank high on Forbes’ 2009 best-places-for business list

Denver Business Journal Feeds

Five Colorado cities made the top 40 of Forbes magazine’s latest list of the best places for business and careers, with Fort Collins ranked No. 2, Denver at No. 14 and Boulder at No. 20.

Also in the upper reaches of Forbes’ 2009 evaluation of 200 U.S. metro areas: Colorado Springs, at No. 10; and Greeley, at No. 37.

Forbes evaluated the 200 largest U.S. metro areas, those with a population of 241,000 or more, on 11 criteria, using data from economic research firm Moody’s Economy.com. Among the criteria were cost of doing business, cost of living, job-growth trends, crime rates and cultural attributes.

Two measurements were added this year to reflect the times: projected job growth and fewest subprime mortgages as a percentage of total originations over a three-year period.

Denver’s highest rankings were for number of colleges (15th), educational attainment (20th) and culture and leisure (21st).

The city’s lowest rankings were for cost of living (133rd) and cost of doing business (130th).

Forbes recently ranked Denver No. 8 on its “Top 30 Most-Wired American Cities.”

Second-place Fort Collins ranked in the top 15 of U.S. cities in four categories: Educational attainment of its population (sixth place), past income growth (ninth), fewest subprime mortgages (10th) and projected job growth (13th).

Its lowest rankings were for number of colleges (158th), despite the fact that it’s the home of Colorado State University, and for culture and leisure opportunities (135th).

Here are the top 20 cities on the 2009 “best places for business and careers” list:

1. Raleigh, N.C.
2. Fort Collins
3. Durham, N.C.
4. Fayetteville, Ark.
5. Lincoln, Neb.
6. Asheville, N.C.
7. Des Moines, Iowa
8. Austin, Texas
9. Boise, Idaho
10. Colorado Springs
11. Albuquerque, N.M.
12. Oklahoma City
13. Wilmington, N.C.
14. Denver
15. Huntsville, Ala.
16. San Antonio, Texas
17. Seattle
18. Winston-Salem, N.C.
19. Charlotte, N.C.
20. Boulder

DBTA Post-Event Coverage of DataRage...

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Embarcadero Finds DataRage Virtual Event Answers Real Need

Embarcadero Technologies recently held DataRage, three days of online technical sessions and a virtual trade show targeted at DBAs, data architects, database developers, security experts, and other database professionals, and found that the virtual approach was the right one for the times, according Greg Keller, chief evangelist, at the company. The online event was held March 17 through March 19.
Embarcadero’s CodeGear Group, the tools group purchased from Borland last year and now integrated within Embarcadero, has held “CodeRages” in recent years, but this was Embarcadero’s first “DataRage” online educational and technical seminar for database professionals.

DataRage included sessions covering Embarcadero products such as DBArtisan, Performance Center, Rapid SQL, Change Manager, ER/Studio, DB Optimizer. It also included topics related to the roles as data architects, developers and DBAs, and technologies such as Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Embarcadero InterBase, IBM DB2 and others, as well as sessions on CodeGear products.
“The experiment that we had here worked in that we wanted to provide this free level of deep technical information over three days. People need that and they are willing to spend parts of their days to join in, and yet they are not able to expend budget to travel to these things,” Keller tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Embarcadero had “very seriously” considered doing a face-to-face version of the event at the end of last year, but decided to postpone it, while instead trying a virtual version of the event. Although not a “massive surprise,” Keller says the level of participation for the virtual conference was a “sheer validation of our efforts.” There were between 1,000 and 2,000 registrants, with an average of roughly 200 attendees per session, he states.
Of all the sessions, the best attended were the modeling-related sessions, says Keller. “You have a lot of developers that truly are wearing multiple hats now.” Many of the attendees' organizations are under considerable strain, and have gone through headcount reductions, he observes. “Many of these folks are forced and required now from an application development standpoint to learn more and dip deeper into the world of the database so the training was perfectly timed for them.”

From Embarcadero's viewpoint, says Keller, “We consider this to be an overwhelming success, mostly for our customers who are able to get some great free training and content.” Looking to future, he adds, Embarcadero is considering a combined CodeRage and DataRage virtual conference for Q3 2009. Replays of the DataRage sessions are now available on the Embarcadero site.

DataRage Replays now Live!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:34:00 +0000

Not able to make it to DataRage? Not to worry!
The recorded versions of all the sessions are now available for replay.

Hey, we all get busy. If you missed any of the live DataRage sessions, the session recordings are now available. Watch them on the Web or download them to watch later. And don't forget to refer them to your colleagues.

After three years of CodeRage success, DataRage was our first data management-focused virtual education conference. It was also a great success. Over a thousand database professionals registered and attended the sessions held March 17^th through the 19^th. Feedback from attendees on the content and expertise of the luminaries who presented was overwhelmingly positive.

Just Added! Short-Subject Videos
To assist with your efforts to efficiently design, build and run database-driven software applications, we created shorter subject "videos on demand". They are available now, alongside the longer-form live session recordings. We think you'll find them helpful!

Join The Embarcadero Developer Network
Both the full-length and short-subject DataRage videos are available for live streaming viewing or download via the Embarcadero Developer Network (EDN), our community-driven site for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Registration for EDN is easy and once you’re in you’ll have access to the site’s key resources and features such as its knowledge bases, blogs, forums and you'll be enabled to provide content as well!

Again, thanks for your interest in DataRage. We look forward to seeing you at our next on-line educational conference!

Greg Keller
Chief Evangelist – Database Tools
Embarcadero Technologies, Inc.

DataRage replays will be up this week....

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:59:00 +0000

I've had a ton of emails , Twitter DMs, Skype calls, you name it, asking when the replays of the DataRage sessions will be available. So I can cover this in one broadcast: we're working on getting everything finalized in both streaming and downloadable media formats by week's end. An emailer to all those that registered will be broadcast to tell you where to grab them (they'll be on the EDN).

Thanks again for joining us!

DataRage Day 1 - Complete!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:09:00 +0000

Well folks, Day one of Embarcadero Technologies' DataRage conference is officially under our belts! We had and OUTSTANDING attendance rate, with registrations now measured in 4 digits!! Sweet!

The sessions on database tools and software development approaches when working against relational databases was outstanding. A few bugs to work out with LiveMeeting but all in all great content, great presenters and great questions.

Tomorrow's session lineup is equally as great as today's. Joe Maguire's presentation as well as a few of our customer's are super compelling if you code SQL or design data(bases) for a living.

Lastly, I'm tweeting like a banshee durin the presentations so foloow the going's on!

Rage on....

TechWeb Announces Winners of the 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:58:00 +0000

TechWeb Announces Winners of the 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards:

Change Manager and J Builder were nominated as Productivity Award Winners at this years Jolt Awards!

Data Modeling Panel Discussion | Enterprise Data World

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:20:00 +0000

So, I got myself elected to be part of a panel at Enterprise Data World in Tampa in April. My bud Chris Bradley from British Petroleum will be leading this discussion along with my main data evangelist on the interwebs, Karen "@datachick" Lopez and some other compatriots to the cause. It looks pretty interesting. The panel will discuss opinions on how to keep data modeling relevant today. I love to be contentious so we'll see what I come up with and I am very bullish on making data modeling 'real' for the masses. In other words, moving the practice from out of the ivory tower of enterprise academia and enable it as a main stream practice...not unlike making a PowerPoint to articulate a point.....just using REAL metadata to do it with!

Datarage | Greg Keller doesn't do ads....

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:28:00 +0000

I'm not an ad guy and I shouldn't play one on TV. But this is an advert for the online conference I'm helping run for database professionals...e.g. data architects, DBAs, developers, and so on. DataRage will offer free education on topics like database optimization, data architecture and database design, change management processes, development against relational databases, and so on. We'll also be doing power user training on Embarcadero's well known database and application development tools. But, I digress, and allow you to hear my adver-rant below...

All systems go for Data Rage...now check your PC!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:40:00 +0000

DataRage the free on-line training and educational conference for database administrators, architects and database developers is almost here. Response to the event has been terrific! And the conference is still getting better. In fact, an exciting new speaker that has just been added.

Joe McGuire-Burton Group
Joe has just been added to the speaker line up! We're excited about his discussion on modeling approaches and on weighing the differences between generalized and specific data modeling. He'll also cover all things helpful to data architects and developers who are looking for more productive – and proactive – ways to solve data storage design challenges before they become issues that must be fixed; always a costly endeavor.

Read Joe’s abstract and review the full conference schedule here. We're updating the agenda and adding presentations almost daily!

You’re ready, but is your PC ready for DataRage?
DataRage will be entirely broadcast using Microsoft’s LiveMeeting. Here are some handy links to ensure you have all the LiveMeeting prerequisites you need to optimize your viewing and interactive participation experience!

Don’t have Live Meeting?
Click here to install Windows Live Meeting 2007.

Already have LiveMeeting?
Click here to check your system to ensure your current LiveMeeting configuration is ready for DataRage!

DataRage! We're Live!! Registration is OPEN

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:16:00 +0000

Q: What's DataRage?

A: DataRage is three days of 100% online technical sessions focused on database development and data management issues which you can attend from wherever you like to log in. It’s bringing you top industry speakers, technologists, and industry practitioners to present on a wide variety of database-related topics, a raging confluence of conveniently-delivered information you can’t get anywhere else. And it’s free!

DataRage is designed for you. It features both advanced and introductory education and training sessions from leading experts to help you with the latest thinking and tips on:

Data modeling and database design techniques
SQL optimization and database development strategies
Database change management and administrative processes
Productivity tips & tricks with industry leading products
- ER/Studio®, DBArtisan®, DB Optimizer™, Rapid SQL®
…And more!

Q: How Do I Register?

A: Easy! Simply click the button below to sign up for any or ALL of the education and training sessions.

ER/Portal's Benefits to Various Roles (the PDF..)

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:42:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote a little post on how the ER/Studio Portal...a tool which helps with technical metadata discovery and understanding...could be leveraged by roles such as developers, DBA's and business folks alike to improve the productivity of their jobs. The Marketing team made this essay all 'pretty like' in this great PDF. Feel fre eto download and enjoy.

ER/Studio Portal Benefits by Role

View more documents from gk_bo_co. (tags: er/studio metadata)

The Podcast at Delphi: Greg K speaks about DataRage and All-Access

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:17:00 +0000

I was interviewed by Jim McKeeth of "The PodCast at Delphi" about DataRage, All-Access and the goings on at Embarcadero these days. Come and have a listen here!

Posted using ShareThis

What's the "C" in CDM Mean?

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:03:00 +0000

What's a CDM...Conceptual or Common. I stumbled upon this blog post and found it to be interesting. Read and comment!

Leveraging Information and Intelligence

David Linthicum

Build a Common Data Model. I dare you.

By David Linthicum on February 20, 2009 5:04 PM 2 0 Vote 0 Votes

Common Data Models, or CDMs, is something I've been pushing for years since the EAI days. These days I'm seeing some good thinking around this problem and some good technology behind it as well. The data is the single most important component of enterprise architecture and data integration, and you need to think carefully about how the data is managed in terms of data integration and business intelligence. In essence, you need a common understanding that spans the enterprise.

Truth-be-told most enterprises have no clue what their core metadata is enterprise wide, no less any sort of CDM for the enterprise. This is a good test for those ready to be successful with data integration, and those that still need to do a great deal of work. Unfortunately, most need to do the work.

How do you build a CDM? It's really an enterprise metadata model, that's fully normalized and compartmentalized, so that there is a complete single, functional, and well defined schema that spans the enterprise. Moreover, all security, logic, rules, and other important information is defined in the CDM. Creating a CDM is just a matter of understanding the existing data, including semantics, structure, integrity, rules, logic, and physical location, and then working through the logical and physical design of the CDM, including normalization, and physical to virtual database abstraction.

While this may sound like a lot of work, I've done it in weeks, as long as the information is there someplace. In some instances you have to do some reverse engineering, and that's really not a problem these days either.

If you don't have a CDM, you should create one. I dare you.

Kyle Hailey demos the new DB Optimizer.

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Kyle posted this gem on our EDN Community page for DB Optimizer. Check it out!

Philip Rathle walks us through All-Access

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:59:00 +0000

Have a looky look:

See all the newly released information on EAA on the new website released today.

You saw it here first: Embarcadero All-Access

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:20:00 +0000

By now your Google Alerts, faithfully set to pick up all kinds of Embarcadero news and general chatter across the interwebs, may have picked up gems like this...or maybe this. Or maybe, if you're REALLY savvy, you saw Wayne pitch the news a bit on YouTube. If not, and you come here first for all your news, then I got the scoop! On February 18th, we launch something we think is pretty game-changing folks:

Embarcadero All-Access™

In a super-brief definition, EAA is the first multi-platform tool chest consisting of a wide swath of tools ranging from database modeling technology, SQL optimization and administrative tools through to IDEs for programming Delphi, Java, Ruby and more. It's designed to give you what you need when you need it at price points designed to be budget conscious. Tools for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL and Sybase....and tools for Windows or web based application development. It's all there. If you were to visualize it, All-Access kinda looks like this...
When we launch it to the public on February 18th, you can find out everything and then some about EAA on our website, but I figured I would tease you a bit with a preview of some new 'tooling on demand' enabling technology we have named 'InstantOn'. This is the stuff that allows you to use the products in your All-Access 'tool chest' products without having to install them! Yup. So, I shot a video of it. Enjoy....

Embarcadero All-Access InstantOn(tm) Preview from Gregory Keller on Vimeo.

DataRage

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:08:00 +0000

So the team and I have been able to sort through ALL of the awesome abstracts sent to us for DataRage. Thanks to all who submitted abstracts and we'll be contacting you this week to indicate your acceptance/time slot/recording parameters, etc. There's some killer content ranging from in-depth power user training for ER/Studio, DBArtisan, DB Optimizer and the rest of the Embarcadero database-oriented products as well as fundepmental education on things like database refactoring, SQL optimization, normalization, performance tuning and more. Special sessions for Delphi users are also being offered on optimizing your ability to rapidly create database-driven applications for Windows.

We'll have three complete days filled with content scheduled for Tuesday March 17th through Thursday March 19th. The sessions will run all day every day but if you can't make a session, no worries, like CodeRage, it'll all be available for you post facto on-demand.

Get ready!

ER/Portal's Benefits to Various Roles

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:59:00 +0000

So we're working on ways to articulate the value of ER/Studio Portal to those that will sit in front of it and use its searching and reporting features every day. The proto-users of ER/Studio Enterprise get this thoroughly, but the benefits of Portal go well beyond them as the primary producsers of this meta-content....out to the enterprise and the various roles that are close to the systems managing data who could be benefitting by knowing more about the data itself. We'll compile this into some further documentation but for the time being, I wanted to get my thoughts out on this subject while I am in the zone on it....

Application Developers:
The ER/Portal provides Developers a searchable inventory of database models, reusable model patterns, and definitions of database objects (metadata) to which they must wire and code the application infrastructure to. The value of the ER/Portal brings is related to radically improving the speed and depth of knowledge a developer can achieve on understanding of their enterprise data infrastructure. As an example, a developer can search for pre-existing data assets which can be re-used (instead of errantly re-creating them) and in doing so, reduce the common issue of data redundancy. Moreover, Developers can ensure correct data types and other storage needs by searching the portal for specific standards which must be used when creating objects such as tables.

Business Analysts:
BA’s, a title ranging from ‘knowledge workers’ to ‘line of business owners’ to ‘marketing analysts’ (e.g. roles who leverage corporate data for assembling critical reports required analysis), benefit by being able to quickly search, source and know where specific types of data exists in data sources around their enterprise. It is key to ensure they not only have ALL the relevant information in their compiled reports, but also the RIGHT data so that they can make critical business decisions. The ER/Portal provides them knowledge of where to source data, what systems and/or processes leverage the data, as well as critical documentation created by Enterprise and Data Architecture teams to describe the semantics of the data. This results in ensuring better data sourcing accuracy for reports and similar needs.

ETL/Decision Support Developers:
During the course of writing complex extraction, transformation and loading code to integrated data from production systems to warehouses and other decision support systems, ETL developers must understand specific business rules on how the data ‘behaves’ in systems to ensure any logic they write, will not modify the meaning of the data. ER/Portal provides specific searchable metadata on data lineage information containing important contextual information input by the business itself to describe the data and any rules being enforced on it. This saves immeasurable cycles in having to re-write ETL code by ensuring developers know up front any nuances they must not affect. Further, ER/Portal provides explicit documentation and visual understanding of the source and target data sources to mitigate complexity in wholly understanding the metadata involved in the ETL processes.

DBAs:
DBA’s focus on performance, availability and uptime SLAs, and benefit by having Portal’s searchable inventory of database models. The ER/Portal also provides various metrics on data storage and information to help them understand more about the capacity and space required of their systems. Further, ER/Portal provides a browse-able inventory of production database systems with physical models that offer visual interpretations of dependencies between database objects (e.g. Procedures with Table and View dependencies). This is monumentally critical as a DBA can visually inspect a dependency model/graph of a database via ER/Portal to ensure that changes being made to specific objects have their dependents updated as well; providing less risk of downtime due to post facto forensics on ‘what broke’ after the change was input and the system was ground to a halt.

Data Architects
DA’s will be as frequent an end user and beneficiary of ER/Portal as the other constituencies named above. Even as the primary authors of the ER/Portal’s content (data models, metadata, definitions, etc), the ER/Portal provides a truly simplistic and efficient way to discover and re-use data assets through familiar search-engine-like approaches. At the enterprise level, a DA may have looked at, modified, modeled or reviewed 1000’s of data definitions and simply cannot contain a memory footprint for that vast amount of information. ER/Portal will provide ways to search for an identify data assets they can repurpose again for new projects in addition to leveraging pre-defined model templates for new projects to enforce modeler standards ultimately reducing object re-creation.

DataRage - Coming to a PC Near YOU!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:46:00 +0000

I'm happy to announce the launch of DataRage....the first database-specific virtual conference that Embarcadero has launched for its DatabaseGear customers, partners and ecosystem. Below is the invitation I have had broadcasted soliciting Calls for Presentations. I would encourage you to submit one as well! This should be fun!

Greetings!

You are invited to submit a presentation for DataRage, Embarcadero’s virtual conference dedicated to database professionals! This conference is currently slated for approximately 2-3 days the week of March 16^th 2009.

Following on the heels of Embarcadero’s successful virtual developer conference, CodeRage III held in 2008, (visit http://conferences.codegear.com/coderage08/sessions for a list of CodeRage topics), DataRage is a FREE virtual conference designed to offer technical education and content to assist anyone who works on, near or around their company’s database infrastructure.

Embarcadero employees, partners and customers alike are being encouraged with this Call for Presentations to submit abstracts which range from:

· Embarcadero product education and power-user training, tips & tricks, customizations

· Role-based process improvements and ‘real-life’ examples for DBAs, database developers, architects,

· Database ‘master’ classes to teach beginner through advanced level skills on database technologies

· Database-related topics you are passionate about!

To submit an abstract of your presentation and to learn more about DataRage and your role as a speaker please visit:

http://conferences.codegear.com/datarage/c4p

Please note that the receipt of this Call for Presentations or the submission of an abstract or presentation does not automatically qualify you as a speaker for this conference. We expect to receive many more abstracts than the number of session slots; therefore, not all candidates will qualify as speakers.

We are tremendously excited for you to contribute your expertise and share this knowledge with other rabid database fans and technologists!

56 Quarters

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:56:00 +0000

So I am back home from a week out at the Mothership for our 2009 sales and company kickoff. I was tweeting like a banshee on all the goings on. Tons of good and quality presentations not only from the exec team but from some incredible customers as well.

The theme this year was 'ignite'...as in we want to light the wick that is going to absolutely blow some stuff up in the community! And by that I mean goodness through some straight forward and obvious value-based programs designed for our customers to benefit and the sales force to be proud of. Combined with that a new and madly aggressive stance on our competition (YEE HAW!) and this is shaping up to be a fun year. Truthfully, we've been 'nice'. Too nice. It's time to jump into the fox hole with the incumbent and duke it out rather than sit idly. This is my very nature and I'm psyched to see us get aggressive.

David I and I presented on the community...a roughly 3.5mm-strong truly global end user community and what is shaping up for them. Stay tuned for a new community based announcement in early February. Think about the union of the CodeGear and DatabaseGear end-user communities, all the technologies they work with (Delphi, Java, C++, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, Web development, etc etc etc etc) and the sophisticated integration of their knowledge and experience to benefit each other (+ a wee bit of Web 2.0 thrown in to make it all gel) and you'll get the point. We're excited to make this happen for the community of end-users...and ANYONE who wants to learn more and share ideas about software development....code AND data mind you....and the management of these systems once rolled out. Watch this space in early February.

Wayne's pitch was excellent. It set the tempo for the year. We're embarking on some new ways to present our company vis-a-vis our product line to our customers in such a simplified way, it should have been done ages ago. This is a major breakthrough for us and will be announced shortly as well in parallel (by design) with the community announcements. Think of a product that basically gives you complete access to the company (products, R & D, community) and you will get a sense of where we're going for you. What was also great to review was where we came from to where we are. 56 quarters. 56 quarters STRAIGHT of profitability. We have been making money, even in some of the worse periods in recent memory (including now) since 1995. Every quarter. 2008 was no different. We had a MASSIVE 12 months in terms of events....like being within the first year of our privatization by Thoma Bravo in 2007...oh, and acquiring and integrating CodeGear....its people, products, community and systems. Just a wee little challenge, right? All this was done with nary a sales blip. These incredible sales teams continued to make it happen and stayed focused these past ~12 months allowing the internal folks to weld together the companies while they started their cross selling and product integration campaigns with customers. We are lean and know what the priorities are to continue to make money and Wayne called it right out: be good at what we are good at and pour what we need to into the quality of those things which we are good at. That's it. Selling tools to software professionals to make them excellent at their jobs is what we are good at and buttressing those household brands we collectively have (ER/Studio, Delphi, DBArtisan, Interbase, etc, etc) are what we need to fundamentally focus on full-stop.

So, that's just a re-cap of the week. WAY more to come and stay tuned for some announcements!

Right brained...

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:31:00 +0000

It should be obvious at this point...I am right brained. The thing that drives me are the connections I make with people, the big pictures I tend to see and the excitement that comes (and shows) when the machinery works and ideas that were once big picture distill themselves down into functional, shippable 'things'. It is the right side of the brain which can make that kitten-herding-through-the-door-process achievable...making gaggles of predominantly left brained folk believe and execute and ultimately successful.

It has its moments....

Funny thing happened to me this Christmas. I opened up no less than 4 copies of the SAME book. Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Each of the cards said nearly the identical thing....something along the lines of: "I read this and it's you!".

Now, I am a notorious cynic of self help or 'next big thing' books. honestly, I know they have a value and may help some folks tremendously, but I dunno...I've always just lived and felt my living and pursued my passions with nothing other than coffee and a vision. Maybe it's about the focus required to keep pushing...and that the horizon has success founded in 'real' things like happiness and pride versus other 'drivers' some are attracted by.

But the book as I read it was a mirror of things for sure. Its premise is interesting...in that the global economic change to practices like outsourcing and the prototypically left-brained strength required in those types of jobs being outsourced will be replaced by labor overseas...leaving this massive vacuum for those with left brained tendencies....but opportunities for right brained skill sets to step forward and allow vision to be articulated and leadership qualities to capitalize on what will certainly be critical management needs of overseas resources executing on product envisioned here.

So I guess, we now are truly poised to be the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.

So this gets me to thinkin'....(be careful a) when this happens and b) when I stop droppin' g's from my words....). Now more than ever our leadership within the company must play and even greater an elevated role as we too resource ourselves in places like Russia, Romania and elsewhere. Positions like Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers and Program Managers must ensure their A game is on as it relates to communication, vision and ability to lead and get it done.

As an example, when I managed groups of products/product lines over the last decade or so, my greatest joy was performing what I called 'the swivel chair' practice. It's a pretty precarious place to be but most notably demonstrated by true career product management types...when you have to swivel to one audience and chameleon-ize to them....e.g. facing your customer and being able to empathize, inspire, listen and respond authoritatively to ensure they have your confidence that you will be able to deliver. And swiveling radically the OTHER way...to your staff that will execute: Engineers, business resources, etc...folks with very serialized ways of thinking about problems which also need a specific kind of leadership, cooperation and massive empathy to their plight to execute.

It all amounts to being a one-legged man in an ass kickin' contest most days...but I wouldn't want it any other way.

A macro level example of this is the growth of the 'PAC' or Product Advisor Council here at Embarcadero. It is a collection of unbelievable souls...customers who bleed for our company, will call us on our faults, but also praise us for what we do right. The PAC is like a macro level example of this swivel chair phenomenon...in operation. Customers with significant investments...and some with little investment in our tools...but each hand selected as they offer something of immense value to the company....specifically to help us prioritize that the RIGHT stuff is being developed and pursued and ultimately fed back to the greater community for us all to succeed. It's a massively right-brain-intensive exercise to fuel debate, temper ideas with realism (while not stifling innovation) and ensuring that our engineering team know they are tapping keyboards which will lead their products to the proverbial fiscal promise land.

Anyhoo, the book's worth the read. Think about your place in the 'practice' and where your communication and leadership skills are. It's going to be a fun ride this next decade....

ER/Studio 8 PodCast on B-EYE Spotlight.

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:57:00 +0000

Jay Tiret shows off some product management ninja tricks during an interview with Ron Powell of B-EYE (a BOULDER Colorado company!). Learn about ER/Studio 8.0 and some of its primary features.

Click here to listen to the MP3.

Embarcadero: much more to come

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:46:00 +0000

Google Alerts grabbed this gem today via the 'ER/Studio' keyword. Interesting perspective by Philip and I can not say I disagree!

Embarcadero's acquisition of CodeGear, which was completed at the end of June last year, has attracted surprisingly little comment. Probably this is because nobody has heard of CodeGear, so I had better go back a bit.

CodeGear was spun out of Borland in 2006 when the latter decided that it was going to concentrate on application lifecycle management because it couldn't hack it in the application development space. Despite the fact that it owned both Delphi and JBuilder (together with variants such as C++Builder) as well as a range of other development tools (and, curiously, the InterBase relational database) Borland couldn't market its way out of a paper bag so it decided to put CodeGear up for sale. But, guess what, nobody wanted it for the price that Borland was demanding, so it sat lonely and forlorn until Embarcadero came and rescued it earlier this year, in what sounds a pretty good deal for Embarcadero who bought it for less than a third of its annual revenues.

Anyway, that's all in the past. More interesting: what can Embarcadero do with all of its new technology? Of course, there have been a number of new releases both on the database management side (Embarcadero's historic playground) and in application development. For example, DB Optimizer has been introduced on the one hand and a new version of RAD Studio (a development IDE for Windows environments) on the other. But both of these were no doubt on the roadmap before the acquisition though fresh investment and a more dynamic approach could well galvanise the CodeGear user base where there is likely to be significant pent up demand for enhancements to the existing products.

More interesting are the potential synergies between the two sets of tools. Of course, one would expect Embarcadero to market its database management capabilities to its CodeGear customer base and vice versa although developers and database managers represent very different constituencies so it may not be as easy as Embarcadero might like.

However, there is scope for developing capabilities that go well beyond mere marketing. Perhaps most obviously one of the biggest problems in database performance management is poorly written SQL. As one of the leading exponents of tools to ensure well-written SQL there is obviously scope for embedding its SQL writing capabilities into its newly acquired development tools. Then again, ER/Studio is one of the leading modelling tools and there is obviously scope for embedding this within the CodeGear development environments. Further, with its expertise in database management it is also likely that we could see a resurgence in development for InterBase, though in the longer term my guess would be that the company would want to sell this, as one of its claims to fame as an independent tools vendor is precisely that it does not compete with the database products that it supports.

Of course, all of this is up in the air at present but it will be fascinating to watch the company develop over the coming months. It has certainly made Embarcadero a more interesting proposition and it has the potential to grow from a significant but niche player to a real alternative to the mainstream vendors across a broad range of capabilities.

Top Information Management Trends for '09

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:55:00 +0000

I did this interview with Joe McKendrck from DBTA. Here is his compilation and my sound-bytes...

THE 15 TOP Information Management Trends for 2009By Joe McKendrick

The old maxim, “may you live in interesting times” certainly holds true for IT managers and professionals these days. The year 2008 was full of changes and challenges, and 2009 promises even more. To look ahead on the challenges emerging, we canvassed industry leaders across the IT landscape to get their views on what to expect in the year ahead.

1. More Urgent Calls for Data Governance

“The current financial crisis has underscored the need for improved data governance, better transparency and the need to more accurately calculate risk. Data governance will emerge as a required discipline for organizations, giving rise to greater trust,” said Steven B. Adler, program director for IBM Data Governance Solutions and chairman of the IBM Data Governance Council.

2. Rise of the Well-Managed ‘Intra-Cloud’

“Ultimately, the ideal mix for larger enterprises may be to have a combination of both public and private clouds, which will allow enterprises control over their critical resources and private data while simultaneously enabling the scalability and efficiency inherent in cloud computing,” said Brian Ott, vice president and CTO of systems and technology for Unisys. “Right now, cloud computing is much more geared toward consumer and retail applications, but we’re starting to see a shift toward the enterprise cloud or, as some people call it, an intra-cloud.”

3. Companies Will Be Challenged With Cloud Data Integration

“On-premise data storage, from centralized data warehouses to content management systems to desktop spreadsheets, will continue to be pervasive for the foreseeable future. As a result, most SaaS applications will need to be integrated with on-premises applications,” said Mike Pittaro, co-founder of Snaplogic. “Short timeframes and limited budgets will make effective integration a requirement, while uncertainty about future plans and vendors will require adaptable integration solutions.”

4. Green IT Will Meet the Cloud

“Cloud computing can help organizations of all sizes go green by providing a shared infrastructure with virtualization capabilities,” said David McQueeney, vice president of technology and strategy for IBM Software Group. “By leveraging shared infrastructure to deploy and balance IT resources for computing tasks in real-time, enterprises can significantly reduce their carbon footprints while freeing up IT resources and decreasing infrastructure operating and maintenance costs.”

5. Clouds and Grids Will Converge

“We believe that 2009 will be the year that cloud and grid computing become practical,” said Gerry Libertelli, CEO, ReadyTechs. “Companies will realize that they can create entire replicas of their internal networks in a co-located, remote cloud; drastically reducing the cost of building and maintaining a disaster recovery site. They scale their systems by being able to incrementally add processing power over time—creating their own unique upgrade path, independent of the hardware vendors.”

6. Greater Push for Business Intelligence and Performance Management

“BI and PM will continue to drive the state of IT in 2009, especially during these uncertain economic times, as IT continues to partner with the business to address the growing demand for more personalized, relevant information,” said Rob Ashe, general manager of business intelligence and performance management for Cognos, an IBM Company. “The insights gleaned will enable organizations to make the leap from ‘data-rich/information poor’ to truly capitalize on its collective intelligence for sustainable competitive advantage.”

7. Rise of Master Data Management for Enterprise Environments and Applications

“As I look into the crystal ball and try to see what 2009 will hold for data integration, it’s all about how it fits into enterprise data consolidation efforts like master data management (MDM),” said Tony Fisher, CEO of DataFlux. “The amount of data that organizations are currently facing is staggering, and that is only going to continue to increase,” he said. “While data integration is an important part of their data strategy, I see it becoming more closely aligned with data quality and MDM environments.” Carl Lehmann, senior vice president of strategy for Advanced Data Exchange, agreed, adding that “Vendors such as SAP have made great strides with a MDM strategy and technology architecture to improve data quality and facilitate cross-functional process flows within a company and across a supply chain.”

8. The Economy Injects Uncertainty Into 2009 Plans

“There’s a real possibility that the current uncertain economy may affect data center initiatives in unexpected ways,” said Pam Taylor, president of SHARE, the IBM users group. “Focus on expense management may become the driver to accelerate initiatives to reduce power costs and recover stranded capacity in deployed infrastructure, leading to more total enterprise virtualization and green data centers. At the same time, the heightened need for competitive differentiation in a tight economy will likely emphasize the need for IT agility, accelerating projects to deploy broader service orientation and to utilize alternative models such as cloud computing or SaaS resources.”

Jim Swartz, CIO of Sybase, sees a silver lining to the turbulent economy and that is in greater IT-business alignment. “Many organizations have already begun to cut their bottom line by transitioning to a green data center,” he said. “In 2009, enterprises can reduce business costs even further by streamlining both IT and business practices. To do so, the task at hand is two-fold: Understand overall needs from business units across the enterprise and identify any overlap, and align IT infrastructure to meet business process and data storage needs.”

9. Economy Will Drive More Open Source

“On the whole, too few CIOs have made the switch to open source and SaaS-based sourcing strategies. This period of economic uncertainty should change all that,” said Doug Harr, CIO of Ingres Corp.“Bad economic times can be a perfect time to swap out old investments for new.”

10. Virtualization Will Mature to‘Grade Two’

“Virtualization will reach maturity in 2009,” said Luc Blanchet, director of software and support services for Amadeus. “For the really large data centers, like the one we run at Amadeus, virtualization still has only been running in test environments. We are now comfortable that we can begin to introduce virtualization technology into our production environment. This is partly because of advances in virtualization products, but mostly because we now feel we have spent sufficient time working with the technology to understand how to achieve the resource and efficiency benefits it offers in a robust and secure way.”

Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, added that virtualization will add complexity to systems decisions. “As virtualization enters ‘grade two,’ there will be a lot more homework, there will be fewer games where everyone is a winner, and there will be a lot more people reading the report cards,” he said. “This will underscore the need for quantitative ways of evaluating options, understanding the decisions, and the days of simply cutting a PO to the ‘default vendor’ will be gone. This trend will be compounded by economic uncertainty, which will cause a high priority to be placed on exploiting proven cost-cutting measures. Ultimately, virtualization planning will become a much more rigorous process.”

11. Virtualization Will Meet Application Management

“Throughout 2009, virtualization will continue to be disruptive and impact IT management in numerous ways,” said Vic Nyman, co-founder and COO of BlueStripe Software. “Managing business applications will continue to be a challenge as virtualization makes it more dynamic–with pieces of applications and services using a variety of resources. Application management will stress relations between the application owners, those responsible for keeping applications available and performing well and secure, and the VM administrators who are pushing to convert more servers, including those with business-critical applications running on them.”

12. More Concern About Virtualization Security

“The explosive growth of technologies such as virtualization and Web applications is resulting in the need for security practices, policies and solutions that extend further than ever in order to protect assets and ensure compliance,” said Chris Whitener, chief strategist for HP Secure Advantage. “Organizations should select a virtualization technology that provides strong security isolation between ‘guest OS’ instances if needed. Additionally, while deploying workloads on virtualized platforms increases mobility, flexibility and agility, this does not mean that the physical infrastructure can be ignored.”

13. The Rise of Data ‘Visualization’

“The visual presentation of analytics will become increasingly pervasive in 2009, because it can help business users see patterns that might otherwise remain hidden,” said Tammi Kay George, business analytics strategist for SAS. “Visualization technology has advanced to the point that even analysis against large data sets can be distilled into a picture that lets trends and relationships ‘jump out’ to the data explorer.”

14. More Service Orienting of BI Applications

“2009 will be the year CEOs and CFOs discover that IT data architectures are disproportionately invested in supporting under-utilized BI and enterprise application software, and under-invested in the long tail of custom applications and sophisticated spreadsheets that line of business professionals actually use,” said Roger Oberg, vice president of product strategy for TIBCO Spotfire at TIBCO Software. “The inaccuracy, insecurity, and lack of scalability of this long tail will continue to expose organizations to unacceptable risks and shift investment to more contemporary SOA application infrastructures.”

15. Developer and DBA Worlds Will Collide

“The worlds of the application developer and database professional have always been intertwined, given the tight dependency of wiring applications to database infrastructures, but we will see the two roles converge in 2009 more than ever before,” said Greg Keller, chief evangelist, DatabaseGear Products, Embarcadero. “In the coming year, nearly every traditional developer will be taking on more of the underlying database work, particularly with the proliferation of Java Enterprise, Ruby on Rails and other database-dependent frameworks that require a deeper knowledge of databases,” he said. “Likewise, the role of database professionals, especially those responsible for architecture, will require more development activities, most specifically XML-related, with the emergence of application integration and service-oriented architecture projects.”

About the Author:
Joe McKendrick edits the 5 Minute Briefing: Data Center email newsletter, serving the SHARE community. He can be reached at Joe@dbta.com.

A JOLT of a surprise!

noreply@blogger.com (Greg) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:33:00 +0000

This was some rather sweet news my Google Alert picked up today! Embarcadero products are finalists in four of the 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards! JBuilder, ER/Studio Enterprise Portal, Change Manager, and 3rdRail are finalists. We’ve won several Jolt Awards in the past and are very proud to be finalists again.

Change and Configuration Management

AccuRev (AccuRev)
Change Manager (Embarcadero Technologies)
JetBrains TeamCity (JetBrains TeamCity)
OpenMake Meister (OpenMake Software)
Plastic SCM (Codice Software)

Database Engines and Data Tools

Altova DatabaseSpy (Altova)
Aqua Data Studio (AquaFold)
ER/Studio Enterprise Portal (Embarcadero Technologies)
Postgres Plus (EnterpriseDB)
Vertica Analytic Database (Vertica Systems)

Development Environments

Altova MissionKit (Altova)
JBuilder 2008 (Embarcadero Technologies)
Komodo IDE (ActiveState Software)
ReSharper 4.1 (JetBrains)
Servoy (Servoy)

Mobile and Web Development

3rdRail for Ruby on Rails (Embarcadero Technologies)
Adobe Device Central (Adobe Systems)
MITE (Keynote Systems)
NetBeans (Sun Microsystems)
Yahoo! SearchMonkey (Yahoo!)

The winners will be announced during the Software Development West 2009 Conference, March 9-13, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. SO it looks like I'll be in Santa Clara in March!